The Long Road

Archives: August 2004

Friday, August 20, 2004

Armed with a list of 25 names, phone numbers, and addresses, I decided to go to Toronto yesterday to look at some housing prospects. Naively, I thought it would be a somewhat easy proposition. Whipping out JLO's cell, and spending a few hours calling and arranging I crossed out 12 out of the 25 contacts due to females only, room taken, or no 4 month lease criteria. Left messages on 6 machines that never got back to me. One phone number wasn't in the GTA and another was out of service. I talked to 2 crazy old ladies whom I would have had to live with, and 1 invalid old man. Out of 6 people who were willing to show me around, 1 of them had potentially rented out his room already, and 3 were a little unsure if they wanted to rent me their place for only 4 months.

The first place I saw was two stories on top of a Fallafel joint and was a small bedroom for 500$ with shared kitchen and bathroom with 4 others. The layout wasn't very appealing since it was all corridors and closed doors. There was no space for socialization, on the off chance of such a thing ever striking my fancy. On the plus side, it was rather clean and the landlord seemed like a nice guy. There was a rotary phone sitting on a table in the hallway by the stairs, I think that made me think 'no'.

The second place was an apartment on Sherbourne. The guy described it as "attached to a No Frills" and made me think it was anothe "student housing on top of store" place. Wasn't quite looking forward to seeing it but upon getting there I saw that it was a tall apartment building attached to a No Frills. Things were picking up. Turns out it was a 3 bedroom suite which was much more in line with my dreams of living in hip and well decorated place. The 2 other people were film school grads who liked vodka a lot.

The third place was called a bachelor apartment but it was really 1 big room and a bathroom. The closet was a rickety, 2 foot wide, free standing cabinet, not big enough to hold anyone's collection of clothing; the kitchen was essentially a electric table top stove plus a mini-fridge under the counter, the bathroom sink doubled as the kitchen sink. Pluses were 2 windows, a quiet neighbourhood, and a small fireplace(!). Same problem about socialization was true in this case as the first place and the run-down slum feel of it wasn't too appealing either, especially for 500$.

By the 3rd place it was already 8:30 and getting around downtown with tentative schedules for seeing places and no real knowledge of the streetcars and buses made going to the other properties I had lined up a tiring proposition. So we decided to call it quits. The other places I wanted to see were outside of downtown and apparently in a bit more "run down" area, but they were close to work.

I'm considering going down tomorrow to look at housing near there but I've been offered the room in the suite and am experiencing the Schnurr effect. The Schnurr effect being what I call seeing 511 Albert at the end of first year after having visited a house where the main floor was slanted. 511 was only the second place we saw but the contrast was so huge that we didn't even bother looking elsewhere.

Should I go tomorrow and look some more or is this 500$ room something that's unbeatable?

Posted by Rayne @ 03:44 PM EST [Link] [7 comments]

Saturday, August 14, 2004

Interviews have been so formulaic in the past. They've gotten to a point where questions are predictable and answers premeditated. Interviews are high pressure situations but so often they're just about moving through the motions and all interviewers go through the same checklist. "Tell me about yourself". How often does one get asked "Name one strength and one weakness"? As if anyone would honestly answer a weakness that they can't turn into a positive statement somehow. "Did you ever find yourself in a situation where you had no work to do and what did you do about it?" If you slacked off for a day before seeking work would you tell them that? Of course not.

I much prefer interviews that are more conversational, and feature questions that probe your personality rather have you tell them exactly what kind of person you are. This way, the whole thing is much more relaxed and natural. And besides, it is now widely believed that personality and cultural fit play a much larger part in job performance than ability does. Technical questions should of course still play a role in this type of interview, but they seem to be much less important. I like how interviews are usually run with one HR person and one technical person though.

Some of the best interview questions I've gotten this term are:
"Name 5 books on your reading list."
"What's your favourite movie?"
"If you were given 1000$, tax free, no strings attached, what would you spend it on?"
"What is the one thing not evident from your resume that you would like us to know about yourself?"
"What websites do you visit most frequently?"
"Name three things you want out of this job."
"Tell us one thing you would change about yourself."
"What's the one word your family would use to describe you?" (and then the same question but using Friends)

Posted by Rayne @ 07:55 PM EST [Link] [6 comments]

Wednesday, August 11, 2004

I'm sure most of you have heard by now of Ken Jennings, the man with the most winnings ever on Jeopardy, who left dozens of dead contestants on the side of the road, figuratively, on his way to becoming one of the most famour game show contestants ever. This was possible due to a small change in the way Jeopardy is played. There is no longer a five day limit for the number of times a winner can appear on the show.

This was a pretty smart move, it was a small change that made the game quite different and the show runners don't lose any more money from having the same contestants coming on over and over again. Even if they did, the soaring ratings more than make up for it.

The problem though, is that this isn't sustainable. Ken will one day lose (maybe he already has? I haven't watched), he'll lose to someone faster and with more knowledge of trivia (trivial knowledge?) than he. And one day, that guy will lose. And so it will go until such a day that there'll be a contestant so fast and so full of knowledge that no one could ever beat him. Unless maybe, he was having a bad day.

The point of the game has essentially changed, it is no longer about beating all the other players, proving yourself, or even winning money, but about beating the champ and becoming the new King of the Hill. Will people despair though? Every game that goes by, the champ gets more and more practice with the buzzer, and better than those who are just coming into the game. There'll be no hope for the regular shmoes that appear on Jeopardy now, everyone who comes on from this point forward has to be superb or just become cannon fodder.

Posted by Rayne @ 11:31 PM EST [Link] [4 comments]

Friday, August 6, 2004

Had a strange exam experience on Wednesday. Weeks before the end of class we were given a list of 18 questions and told that the exam would be made up of 10 of those questions. Of course, I spent like 3 days answering all the questions as best as I could but somehow kept feeling that the exam would have some kind of surprise to it. Surprisingly, the exam had no surprises; it was very straightforward - ten questions from the set we were given, just as she said.

Not that I'm complaning, but doing it this way made the exam much too easy. And too easy to prepare for. There was no struggle during the exam at all, just straight up regurgitation. There were even some questions that I didn't remember exactly how to do but did remember the answer I got and was able to work my way backwards. And then there were those questions where I bothered only to memorize the steps to the solution without understading the underlying concepts.

Talking to one of the TAs, he said that the prof was just trying out an "experiment". I think the better way to do this, as some of my old profs/teachers have done, is to tell the students what KIND of questions will be asked or to give a very representative version of the exam to practice with. This way ensures at least some kind of applied knowledge can be tested and is better than the standard "study everything" approach which is usually too much material to be tested on anyways. I'm all for "focused studying", learning (and understanding) only the important concepts and procedures that the prof wants you to know. It's unreasonable to expect that a student will know everything that was taught over the course of 4 months, this just causes overload and information just gets purged as it gets written onto the exam paper anyways. It's as if what you studied was some weight your consciousness had to hold onto and is relieved to let it go when you know you don't need it anymore (in the imediate future, at least).

Break

Exam period always feels like a sequence of Sundays. I'm always dreading the upcoming "Monday" and keep thinking I should get some work done but never get to it. I've also noticed that the night before an exam, I'm often of the mentality that I probably know enough material but it would be very nice to have an extra day to reinforce all this knowledge so that it's a bit less fleeting. Of course, I've usually wasted a day or so not studying by this point.

Posted by Rayne @ 12:47 AM EST [Link] [2 comments]

Wednesday, August 4, 2004

Standard Operating Procedure.

*takes care of some long overdue emails*

Posted by Rayne @ 03:42 AM EST [Link]

[Archive Index] [Main Index]